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As some Alabama Amazon workers cast their votes to unionize the company’s first U.S. warehouse last week, something strange was happening on Twitter. Accounts apparently owned by warehouse workers were tweeting users supporting the union or making unsavory comments on Amazon in general. Amazon’s anti-union Twitter army has been the subject of criticism and mockery in recent years, inspiring a multitude of accounts parodying true Amazon ambassadors, but the fight against Bessemer has brought it all back under the radar. spotlights.
Over the weekend, one parody account, in particular, caught the attention of reporters and Amazon critics on Twitter: @AmazonFCDarla. Darla’s profile picture looked fake, but the language used in her tweets was eerily similar to that used by real Amazon employees. Publications like Gizmodo quickly debunked Darla’s account. His profile picture appears to have been created by an artificial intelligence program like This Person Does Not Exist. His account was created in March without tweets from the start of Amazon’s Ambassador Program. And Darla’s tweets were half cooked “like a troll could tweet”, Gizmodo said.
An Amazon spokesperson confirmed to The edge that many accounts were not created by company employees. “Many of them are not Amazon FC ambassadors – it looks like they are fake accounts that violate Twitter terms, ”a spokesperson said. “We have asked Twitter to investigate and take appropriate action.”
It didn’t take long for Twitter to suspend Darla and other fake accounts for “identity theft” reasons.
Robby Appleton, a comedian from Chicago, came out on Tuesday saying he created the Darla account to parody the real ambassadors of Amazon Twitter. “On Friday I created a satirical Twitter account poking fun at Amazon’s anti-union propaganda,” Appleton said in a tweet. earlier this week. “I can’t understand how far this stupid Twitter account has gone,” he said in another.
Appleton provided a variety of evidence to support the claim, including two email responses from Twitter regarding an account suspension he claims to be Darla. The first email shows Twitter’s response to his call for the account to be reinstated. Appleton also forwarded an email from Twitter confirming that an account belonging to his email had been “permanently” suspended for violating the platform’s rules on “identity theft.”
Twitter declined to confirm or deny that Appleton was the user behind the @AmazonFCDarla account on Wednesday.
I spoke with Appleton on Tuesday night about why he opened the account and what he would say to Amazon if the company still pays attention to the gag order.
This interview has been edited slightly for clarity.
Why did you decide to create the account in the first place?
It was Friday afternoon when I first did the count, and I had watched all the news with the Amazon plant in Alabama trying to unionize. I was looking at all the really weird responses from the Amazon News account to Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren, and I was like, “This is a really crazy PR strategy that they seem to have.”
Then I started spotting these Amazon FC accounts, and I knew there were a lot of spoofs, but a few of them looked legitimate. They had very little commitment, like three or four followers. They would respond to something and get hate most of the time. It was so weird to me that Amazon is forcing its employees to stay on the clock and be sycophants to the people who hire them. Moreover, their strategy was so chaotic that it was not even effective. And I thought, because it was so chaotic, that maybe I could make a count and maybe fool a dozen people into believing it was real and have a little fun with it.
How much time did you spend on the account? And what was your strategy for writing the tweets?
It was actually pretty minimal. I know a lot of Twitter sleuths kept looking for the profile picture. It was AI generated from that person does not exist. And the reason was that I was just lazy. If I thought this was going to cheat a lot of people, I probably would have had a friend or family member pose for a photo.
I spent the whole weekend with my girlfriend’s parents for Passover. I didn’t have a lot of free time because we were cooking, eating and going shopping because I had new cats. Most of these events happened in short moments I could fly on my phone. But the strategy was just that I wanted to see how far I could push one of those accounts without making it so absurd no one would believe me. I’ve learned to keep it just realistic enough that I think I can cheat most people while still keeping it heavily satirical.
How long did you intend to keep pushing this schtick?
Honestly, I didn’t have a real strategy. Once the account was suspended, it was clear that I wasn’t going to have fun with it anymore. Yesterday I knew the end was near, so I decided that today I was going to publish a fake PowerPoint presentation for Amazon that started out as an anti-union talk and turned into this very strongly pro union “seize the means of production” Diatribe. But Twitter put me on hold for a bit before I could do that.
Maybe I was going to put the Soviet national anthem on it at the end.
It was reported that Amazon asked Twitter to investigate the account. If Amazon is still paying attention, what would you say to the business now?
If their working conditions are as good as they claimed, they should welcome a union because that would be the pride of every union. If they’re so good that they don’t need a union, the union steps in and absolutely praises the good work they do.
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